A Feature Matrix To Choose A VPS

This site is good, though every day people on hosting hunts come here to ask questions about how to find a company. Here I am doing it, but I want to suggest or find something better -- a tool to help narrow down the hosting hunt based on parameters. Has anybody made one?

My parameters are harder to find for than I would like. For example, I want a west coast VPS, so that my ping time from Silicon Valley will be minimal. To my surprise, some hosting companies block ping on their main page, and many don't have reverse DNS, forcing one to do ping -n. (Not that it's hard to do ping -n, but why make it harder for anybody!)

The next thing I want is ubuntu. For the simple reason that this is what I am standardizing on for all my systems, and using the same system means less figuring out how to do it twice. And in many cases the ability to compile on one machine and upload to the server.

Next I want lots of memory -- 768mb or more, and I want burstablity, even though I know it only happens sometimes. To me, the whole point of a VPS is that you get more resources when you need them, and when you scale back, another user gets to burst in them and everybody has a better chance at giving good response in peaks.

Next I want a decent price, $60 or so. Once you get to $90 you can get dedicated servers, that market is getting more competitive. Dedicated servers can't burst, but they can swap, meaning that the unused pages from your deaemons and rarely used programs page out, so your ram total is for live ram that's being used. On a VPS your ram total is for everything. VPSs have processes die when they hit the ram wall, dedicated servers just get slower as they swap.

I don't want a control panel, and I don't want to pay for one. You don't usually get them with ubuntu anyway. Except the virtuozzo panel for reboot etc.

Of course I demand a site with a good reputation, fast support response time (when I need it) and high uptime.

The winner in my search was vpslink with the special they had running until the 7th. They don't do bursting but their special made a high-ram server come into my price range to make up for it. But it's no longer running.

Knownhost is pretty good but doesn't do Ubuntu.

I am also very interested in what imountain does, offering you shared SQL database access on a different, non-virtualized server. I like that idea a lot. But they do only Centos, and they don't burst ram (but they don't need to as much)

Futurehosting also seems good, but their ping time at 66ms to Dallas is too high, and I am scared because their own personal DNS was down for several hours yesterday.